José Esteban Muñoz once described the problem of minoritarian knowledge and cultural production within a majoritarian sphere thus:

Consider an unlikely scenario. In the midst of World War I, a motley group of Jewish refugees in their teens and early twenties becomes obsessed with the idea of creating a “Yiddish art theatre” modeled upon Stanislavski's famous Russian company. By day they work as laborers, storekeepers, housepainters, and wartime smugglers; by night they teach themselves the basics of acting and stagecraft from outdated Russian and German books. The only theatre building where they can afford to perform is a dilapidated former circus on the outskirts of town, repurposed by the German army as a military stable. The roof leaks, and the stage reeks of horse dung. It is a bitterly cold winter, and since there is no money for heat, the actors rehearse with frozen limbs and thaw their stage makeup over the footlights. They eat one meal a day—a single boiled potato—and rehearsals are routinely interrupted when actors faint from hunger.

I want to begin with a memory of buried faith that speaks rather precisely to the argument that follows about the duplicitous nature of performance during the English Reformation. The memory belonged to Benjamin Franklin, who opened his Autobiography with an account of his Protestant family during the reign of Mary Tudor:

The December 1970 issue of the Canadian newsmagazine Maclean's features an article by movie critic John Hofsess designed to promote the new film Fortune and Men's Eyes and to alert readers to that drama's importance to Canada as a nation. The piece is subtitled “A Report from the Set in a Quebec City Prison” and announces John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes as “the most famous Canadian drama of the last decade—it's been translated into eight languages and performed in 14 countries.” Hofsess's first paragraph, however, does not contain Fortune's list of accolades; instead, the author begins his piece with the following extraordinary narrative:

In a theatre world increasingly dominated by multinational corporations, in which brand-name companies make the rounds of international festivals and multilingual performances are bankrolled by consortia of state-supported theatres, the national identity of theatrical productions is becoming more and more difficult to decide. This identity crisis is especially pronounced in the case of the one theatre form that for generations has been associated with a single New York thoroughfare that for people around the world symbolizes singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. The form to which Broadway is categorically linked, the Broadway musical, may have circumnavigated the globe countless times, but a national and municipal identity remains embedded in its name. In the twenty-first century, however, this jet-setting genre needs to be analyzed less from a national or international perspective than a transnational perspective that emphasizes interconnectedness and the cross-border fluidity of cultures and species of capital. Shows such as The Lion King and Wicked may have premiered in New York, but their continuing multibillion-dollar success in cities on six continents suggests that the traffic in the most popular form of theatre in the world can no longer be linked to one metropolis or one national tradition.

In 2004, Singaporean presenter Tang Fu Kuen commissioned French avant-garde choreographer Jérôme Bel to create a work in collaboration with classical Thai dancer-choreographer Pichet Klunchun. The resulting piece is unlike most intercultural collaborations. In the world of concert dance, East–West interculturalism takes place in a variety of ways: in costuming or set design, in theme or subject matter, in choreographic structure, in stylings of the body, in energetic impetus, in spatial composition, in philosophical attitude toward art making. Bel's work, titled Pichet Klunchun and Myself, does not combine aesthetics in any of these ways. In fact, the piece may more accurately be described not as a dance but as two verbal interviews (first by Bel of Klunchun and then vice versa) performed for an audience and separated by an intermission. There is no actual intermingling of forms—Thai classical dance with European contemporary choreography—in this performance. The intercultural “choreography” here comprises a staged conversation between the artists and some isolated physical demonstrations by each.

Music scholars Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff have researched what they call “a deep African American vaudeville theater tradition” in Memphis during the first decade of the twentieth century that helped lead the way to the commercialization of the blues. Their body of work provides a very useful and fascinating historical overview of the black vaudeville scene of the time on the national level. This article seeks to broaden that overview, using a much more focused, microhistorical perspective on the history of theatre management on one particular street in one particular, midsized southern city. It argues that in Memphis, the story of African American and Italian American theatre managers shows that realities were often much more complex than histories that portray a rigid and heavily drawn color line have suggested.

The collaborative “antiopera” El gallo: Ópera para actores (The Cock: An Opera for Actors), which was produced from 2007 to 2009 by Mexican theatre company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes (hereafter referred to as Ciertos Habitantes) and British composer Paul Alan Barker, toured for three years to dozens of venues in Mexico and abroad, garnering numerous awards and accruing more than a hundred performances. Performed in speech/song gibberish, El gallo mingles physical theatre and butoh techniques. The piece chronicles the making of an opera, from auditions through rehearsals and performance, alongside the emotional, physical, and vocal breakdowns of the five main characters and their beleaguered director. El gallo enacts an allegory of conflict-ridden community formation through the device of a play within a play.

In the closing scene of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's melodrama La Tête de mort; ou, Les Ruines de Pompeïa (1827), audiences at Paris's Théâtre de la Gaîté were presented with the spectacular cataclysm of an erupting Mount Vesuvius that invaded the city and engulfed the hapless characters in its fiery embrace. “The theatre,” Pixérécourt writes, “is completely inundated by this sea of bitumen and lava. A shower of blazing and transparent stones and red ash falls on all sides…. The red color with which everything is struck, the terrible noise of the volcano, the screaming, the agitation and despair of the characters … all combine to form this terrible convulsion of nature, a horrible picture, and altogether worthy of being compared to Hell.” A few years later, in 1830, Daniel Auber's grand opera La Muette de Portici (1828), which yoked a seventeenth-century eruption of Vesuvius with a popular revolt against Spanish rule in Naples, opened at the Théâtre de Monnaie in Brussels. The Belgian spectators, inspired by the opera's revolutionary sentiments, poured out into the streets and seized their country's independence from the Dutch. These two famous examples, which form part of a long genealogy of representing volcanic eruptions through various artistic means, highlight not only the compelling, immersive spectacle of nature in extremis but also the ability of stage scenery to intervene materially in the narrative action and assimilate affective and political meanings. As these two examples also indicate, however, the body of scholarship in literary studies, art history, and theatre and performance studies that attends to the mechanical strategies and symbolic purchase of volcanic representations has tended to focus mainly on Europe; more research remains to be undertaken into how volcanic spectacles have engaged with non-European topographies and sociopolitical dynamics and how this wider view might illuminate our understanding of theatre's social roles.

In 1874, a group of newsboys took on some of the wealthiest, most respected, and most powerful New Yorkers and emerged victorious. The Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, a philanthropic organization that worked to guard public morals and championed Christian values, faced two challenges that year over the city's theatre licensing fee. Its prominent members and their financial power made the organization a formidable force in local city matters. As a result of the 1872 Act to Regulate Places of Public Amusement in the City of New York, theatre managers were required to pay $500 to the city for an operating license. The city gave the fees to the society, which it used to operate the city's House of Refuge. The society believed that theatres corrupted the city's youth and that, therefore, the theatres should help fund youth reform efforts. In its legal proceedings against theatres without licenses, the society typically targeted cheap entertainment establishments in poor neighborhoods. These playhouses “were not particularly powerful and presumably would not put up too strenuous a legal battle.”

In ‘“You Are Here’: H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance,” a chapter in The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor locates the intergenerational transfer of traumatic memory relating to Argentina's Dirty War geographically with a map—identifying, for example, where tens of thousands opposed to the country's military dictatorship (one-third of them women) were made to disappear—but she also locates this transfer genealogically and even genetically, in terms of the bodies of surviving relatives who remain as visible evidence (quite literally, through family photographs) of the material existence of their missing parents and children. Like Taylor, I attend to both the physical geography and the embodied genealogy of cultural memory in this article, which is concerned with making connections between the hemispheric traffic in missing and murdered Indigenous women of the Americas. I want to begin by acknowledging some of the sites of individual trauma and various sights of collective protest and witnessing related to this topic.

In May 2010, a general election in the United Kingdom produced a coalition government headed by David Cameron's Conservatives and (nominally) the Liberal Democrats under deputy PM Nick Clegg. The coalition (still in power in 2014) quickly plunged the nation into a period of postcrash austerity the likes of which had not been seen for generations. When I landed at Heathrow in June 2012 to start a new job at Queen Mary University of London, the ground was thick with casualties—and getting thicker. Significant challenges to the U.K. welfare state have been launched before, of course: most visibly and famously under Margaret Thatcher, perhaps more insidiously and tenaciously under Tony Blair. Blair, having learned the lessons of Thatcher's blunt brutality, was a consummate salesman of the public–private partnership, but in 2010 the facade of “feel good” neoliberalism was almost instantly in danger of cracking. Shortly after the election, Clegg backtracked on his promise not to raise tuition fees, allowing the government to triple university students' annual bills to £9,000. By the end of that year protests had taken over the streets; Brits of all social classes were struggling, and angry.

The recently rediscovered dramatic works of a major thirteenth-century Egyptian author, Muhammad Ibn Dāniyāl, provides a striking example of how the strategies of microhistory can provide an important challenge to, and possible reassessment of, the grand narratives that theatre history has often accepted without serious question. Ibn Dāniyāl is an excellent example of the sort of outsider that has attracted the attention of microhistorians, one of those “peoples who would be left out by other methods.”

In her essay in the most recent Re: Sources column, Sharon Marcus argues for the importance of theatrical scrapbooks as historical resources and notes that, to date, they have been largely neglected. I offer the current essay as a companion piece to Marcus's in that I would like to argue for the importance of another largely neglected resource for theatre researchers: trade catalogs. Specifically, I will focus on the mail-order trade catalogs of magic supply houses that were prevalent throughout the twentieth century until Web sites took over as the primary marketing tools for these establishments. I also draw upon Christopher B. Balme's idea that historiographic rewards can be earned by paying close attention to the information contained in theatrical playbills. Balme posits that one reason playbills have been neglected is because they are considered to be further removed from a theatrical performance than visual evidence such as photographs, designs, or videos:

In this wide-ranging interview conducted by Associate Editor Harvey Young, Thomas Bradshaw reflects on his plays, talks about the determining influence of class in contemporary society, and comments on his reputation as a provocateur.